Talking of crime books
Amateur Cracksman
Benny Green
At some time in 1892, Conan Doyle's sister Connie brought home her chap, a dapper, short-sighted young journalist called Willie, Whose prospects were not very much more impressive than his income. A year later the Young couple were married, subsidised by an allowance from Conan Doyle. As it happened, Doyle subsidised them to the tune of something else also, although nobody quite grasped the fact at the time. Impressed by the success Which had attended his brother-in-law's efforts in reviving the Quixote-Sancho Panza equation in the form of Holmes and Watson, Willie must have figured that what one man could do, so Could another, and in 1899 published a book called The Amateur Cracksman, in which Holmes and Watson were heavily disguised as A. J. Raffles and his friend Bunny. The Amateur Cracks man was an immediate best-seller, added a noun to the English language, caused hopeless confusion among succeeding generations in the matter of the founder of the commercial fortunes of Singapore, and lent Willie's reputation a lustre which seventy five years later has still not quite faded away.
Hornung and Holmes make an interesting contrast, both as men and writers. Although only seven years older than Willie, Doyle seems to the modern reader to have come from a different age, an illusion fostered by Doyle's rigidly Victorian sense of rectitude, his fearless integrity, his bristling sense of what was right. on the other hand appears to have been iar more relaxed, in the style we associate, lightly or wrongly, with those non-existent flaneurs, the Edwardians. The differences are seen at their most striking in the contrasts between Holmes and Watson on the one hand, and Raffles and Bunny on the other. In fact so antipathetic are the two sets of mirror-images that it is quite impossible to dream up a scenario of the slightest conviction involving all four men.
Holmes would have curled his lip in derision at the mere mention of a flannelled fool like Raffles living so irresponsible a life, comPounded of grubby felonious intent and irritating, unfeeling snobbery. As for Bunny, both Holmes and Watson would have wondered privately about that young man's Potential as a sexual deviant, and then dismissed him as a shallow, sycophantic cur With the ethics of a hyena and the intellect of a gnat. It was the intellect which would have troubled Homes and Watson most, for never once in their adventures did Raffles and Bunny ever present any evidence of cerebral subtlety. Raffles possessed a kind of low cunning, which was made to seem more ingenious than it really was by Bunny's congenital idiocy whenever it came to anticipating the plot.
And yet Rattles went to the hearts of the ,reading public and remained there for such a long time that three quarters of a century later publishers are willing to speculate on his continuing attraction*. For Raffles is an English archetype, the sporting gentleman who lives on his wits, the handsome, attractive scoundrel, who contrives through sheer force of personality to dupe people into believing that although he may break the law without a
* Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman E. V. Hornung (Hamish Hamilton £2.50)
Raffles, the Black Mask E. V. Hornung (kHarnish Hamilton £2.50)
„dfnes Revisited Barry Perowne (Ha mish rlamilton £3.50). To be published on March 31. thought, there is some mysterious code of his own to which he remains staunch. After all, Raffles is the best slow-bowler of his generation, a player of such subtlety that he can take five wickets in an innings for the MCC at Lord's, and no man capable of so sublime an act can be altogether bad, at least in the canons of the unwritten Edwardian law.
The Raffles stories, which stretched over several volumes, retain the identical pattern. Bunny, a slow-witted man-about-town whose inability to sell his stories to London editors may be a faint echo of what Willie had had to endure as a bachelor, is always losing his money at cards and sitting in one room somewhere in central London looking glumly down at a handful of copper coins. In desperation he goes looking for the great A. J. Raffles, whose fag he once was, and whose resource in a crisis is legendary. Raffles lives in bachelor splendour at the Albany, through whose palm-courts fog is always obligingly swirling whenever Bunny arrives. There then follows a conversation in which Bunny mumbles about "my people" and reminds Raffles of the good old days when the study fires flashed at dusk. Raffles, finding the old school ties too strong to break, agrees to help Bunny by allowing him to go out thieving with him. The rest of the narrative concerns various adventures in which shadowy figures are politely relieved of their jewels.
Some of the writing shows evidence that Willie Hornung had a faint feeling for language, for instance in A Jubilee Present when the janitors at the British Museum "looked less stalwart than usual, as though their medals were too heavy for them," but sadly Willie put his money on the fain-leif style of narrative which has dated so utterly that today the Stories are curios rather than adventures in the sense that Willie intended. What really separates one brother-in-law from the other is the blackguardism of the Raffles stories. Physical . brutality, xenophobia, sadism and arrogance tumble across the page in a way which ought surely have given the patron saint of Holmes a bout of apoplexy.
And yet Doyle seems to have considered Willie so scintillating a wit that he nominated him as a superior comedian to Sam Johnson. What Doyle probably meant when he made the claim was Willie's gift for a pun, for it was Willie whO coined that famous piece of facetiousness, "Be he ever so humble, there's no police like Holmes," Willie who read in the newspapers of a runner who had done a hundred yards in one second and defined it as a sprinter's error, Willie who read an early tale of detection and described it as "pre-Raffle-ite." But the Raffles stories, apart from the exhibition of a certain Classical smattering, have only their plots and their atmosphere to commend them, and as the plots are nondescript, that leaves the atmosphere, which works very well in some stories, for example The Wrong House, not so well in several of the others.
Long after he had been received into the bosom of Doyle's family, Willie behaved rather badly in the matter of Doyle's romance with Jean Lecky in the days before the first Mrs Doyle died. The argument between the two men reads like a parody of the morality of the period. Doyle is playing for the MCC at Lord's and Miss Lecky comes to admire. Willie spots the two of them together and there is a bitter dispute over the ethics of a gentleman being seen at Lord's with Another Woman. That sort of behaviour might have been all right at the Oval, but never at the headquarters of the game. Those who are curious about what eventually happened to Raffles might be able to make something out of the sad fact that Willie's only son was killed at Ypres. As for Raffles's cricketing prowess, David Niven, the one actor as far as I know to succeed in making Raffles credible, told me that once in Hollywood he played in an eleven which included three England captains, Sir C. Aubrey Smith who, as "Round-the-Corner Smith" had once taken five wickets in an innings in a test match, C. B. Fry, who was en route to Australia to write on a test series, and G. 0. Allen who was headed in the same direction to play for England. Niven-Raffles reckoned, probably rightly, that this was the strongest club side ever mustered. They were beaten by the Pasadena C.C.
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